The aim of the contest is to promote innovation in EDA, by providing a venue for individuals and teams to showcase their software.

Criteria for entry to the software contest in VLSI 2009

For VLSI 2009, we solicit entries for the EDA software contest from individuals and teams.
 

Criteria for submission

• The design and implementation should have taken place within 24 months prior to the submission deadline, certified so by the submittors.

• The software should be operational, and demonstrated at venue with appropriate data sets

The software and associated rights will remain the property of the submittors. The conference will have the right to publish the abstract and/or the full final written submission at its site and its distributions. It is the responsibility of the submittors to associate patent and copyright information alongside the submitted written material, if applicable.

Contest scope

The software can be for the planning, design, verification and analysis of analog, digital, or programmable circuits and systems. Submitted entries must be working pieces of software. The target fields for the software include:

• Digital Integrated Circuits

• Analog Integrated Circuits

• FPGA based designs

• Computer Architectures/ Processors

• Reconfigurable Computing Systems

• SoC / Platform-based designs

• Embedded Systems

• MEMS/Optics/Bio-Chips

• Innovative Design Methodologies and Verification Techniques.

Contest Categories

There will be a single category for deciding the prizes: Operational software. Proposals or conceptswill not be entertained. The entry must be accompanied with test data sets that can be run live. Contestants need to bring necessary hardware (laptop, desktop, etc) and 3rd party tools to be able to perform the live demonstration. Contestants should ensure that they have necessary approvals if their demo uses commercial software or any other copyrighted material.
Contestants must submit a proposal, based on which a subset of the entries will be asked to make a live presentation (demo) of the software during the conference. Judges will make a decision based on the final presentation, independent of the initial proposal (i.e.
the initial ranking/marking will not be carried forward). Each team would be given 20 minutes to demonstrate their software. They may use powerpoint presentation slides, charts, etc. to assist their demo.
A synopsis of each short-listed entry will be included in the conference proceedings.
 

Evaluation Criteria

A panel of experts from industry and academia will judge the submissions. Submitted entries will be reviewed in a process similar to the review process for the technical papers. The following list provides some of the criteria that will be applied in the short-listing and final selection of entries:

• Motivation/Justification for submission

• Reliability of the software (correctness)

• Quality of implementation (robustness)

• Performance of the implementation (runtime, memory)

• Novelty of algorithm or architecture

• Development strategy (software design/construction/test process and tools usage)

Your abstract/proposal submission should contain the following:
  - description of the problem
  - description of previous solutions to the problem, if any
  - description of the solution adopted, pointing out the novelty of the strategy adopted, and some indication of the quality and superiority of the results over prior solutions
  - details of software implementation

The abstract should be limited to 4 pages. The entries are not anonymous, so you should include author/programmer name and affiliations.

 

The final submission must have

1. A written report, which must cover the following (much like a full paper)
  - description of the problem to be solved
  - description of prior solutions to this problem, and their shortcomings
  - description of the solution adopted in the software
  - description of the sample data used for the demo
  - description of results
  - comparison with previous results
  - explanation of data structures and algorithms used, and the control and data flow of the software
  - description of the strategy, tools and processes used for the development and testing of the software
  - accuracy (correctness, quality of results), runtime performance and capacity graphs/tables, if any
  - conclusion, limitations, future directions

2. A demonstration (with accompanying presentation, if required) which shows
  - live start-up, execution and successful termination of the software
  - display of results for sample results
  - execution of software for variations from the sample, as called out by the judges
  - execution on erroneous inputs
  - execution on large data-sizes, if feasible


The time-line for the various milestones is

Initial submission - 1st October 2008
Deadline extension for EDA-Software Contest - 8th October 2008
Intimation of selection - End of October 2008
Demonstration - Day 1 of conference
Results announced - Day 2 of conference

The judges are free to choose between zero to three winners, depending on the number of entries and the quality of the submissions. The names of the winners will be carried by all official communications from the VLSI Conference, and will feature on the conference website. The winners will get a certificate and prize money, which will depend on sponsorships, but will be at least -

1st Prize - Rs. 25000/-
2nd Prize - Rs. 10000/-
3rd Prize - Rs. 5000/-